Pedesis - Movement of Matter

From Thomas Nail's latest book, Philosophy of Motion ->

...energy flows in, cycles through, and then flows out—of everything. Structure and form are the metastable by-products of energetic flows. We should think of forms not as fixed, unchanging entities but as fabrics woven from crisscrossing threads.

I call this fabric of processes a “field.” A field emerges when a group of processes all fold together, entrained, and give the appearance of a formal unity. Fields are like schools of fish; each alteration weaves into a tessellated and changing whole. A field is a process of processes ordered in such a way as to produce the global effect of a relatively stable reality.

This does not mean that there are no relative conflicts between various folds or fields. Larger and more powerful folds can swallow up and entrain smaller ones, as when animals eat one another. Social fields can go to war and unravel one another. Fields also have indeterminacies and instabilities that can make them fall apart or dissolve.

Some fields can even produce relatively stable patterns that conceal their metastable nature and generate the appearance of ontological fixity. For instance, rocks tend to move very slowly compared to the human lifespan and so they appear static. However, at larger time scales, rocks
flow like rivers across the earth...